We're sending this special edition of our newsletter today because the U.S. Congress is holding hearings on horrible legislation known as the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) which would directly attack the technical architecture of the Internet and put every website at risk of being taken offline, even due to a single baseless accusation from a copyright troll. SOPA will hit "user generated content" especially hard -- many collections of CC-licensed works will disappear. Read more in our blog post -- Urgent: Stop [U.S.] American censorship of the Internet.

To take action now by contacting officials and spreading the word, please visit americancensorship.org -- a site that CC is proud to support along with friends such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Software Foundation, and Public Knowledge.

Creative Commons was built with and is sustained by the generous support of organizations including the Center for the Public Domain, Google, LuLu, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla Corporation, The Omidyar Network, Red Hat, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as members of the public (you!).